ing of Mrs. Carlyle's letters--letters which
come not within our terms of reference and from which, therefore, we
cannot decently quote--is remarkable: only, even here, his intolerable
virtue and vanity, his callous self-content, his miserable, misplaced
self-pity and his nauseous sentimentality parade themselves on almost
every page. For all his "Oh heavenses," "courageous little souls," and
"ay de mis," he never once guessed the nature of his offence, never
realized the beastliness of that moral and religious humbug which to
himself seems always to have justified him in playing tyrant and vampire
to a woman of genius.

III

The volumes before us, as we have hinted, were expected, not without
excitement, by those people for whose benefit we are about to review
them. It must be confessed that they have not wholly escaped the fate
that is apt to befall the progeny of parturient mountains. Not that they
are precisely what Horace would have expected them to be: they are
anything but small; yet, about the contents there is something
mousey--the colour perhaps. The fact is, they are disappointing. The
letters they contain--a bare third of which are by Jane Welsh--were all
written between the middle of 1821 and the end of 1826--that is to say,
before either Jane or Carlyle had found themselves. At his best, Carlyle
was not a letter-writer; he was a clever man who wrote letters. These
have sometimes the personal quality of a good essay, never the charm of
familiar correspondence. In these early days his mind is as undeveloped
as his style; he is crude, awkward, over-emphatic; apter at catching the
faults than the excellences of the eighteenth-century prose writers.
That one should write to please rather than to improve one's
correspondent was an idea which seems hardly to have occurred to him:

"When I sit down to write Letters to people I care anything for, I
am too apt to get into a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite
great quantities of nonsense, which even my own judgment
condemns--when too late for being mended."

That is his own admission. Here is a specimen of his solemn admonitions
to his future wife:

"I very much approve your resolution to exercise your powers in
some sort of literary effort; and I shall think myself happy, if by
any means I can aid you in putting it in practice. There is nothing
more injurious to the faculties than to sit poring over books